This page is being developed. Come back soon to learn more about the talks I've given and what I'm looking to do next.

Speaking

Over the past decade, I have led workshops and given talks at museums, universities, and conferences on topics of art, technology, design, and anthropology. I'd love to visit with you too. Get in touch if you're planning an event and would like me to participate.

UPCOMING TALKS & EVENTS

I'm scheduling my next talks and events for 2018 - 2019. I'm most interested in talks and workshops that deal with technology, design, inclusion, diversity, gender, art, and anthropology. Send me a message if you'd like to discuss your upcoming event. Please include a note about honorarium, travel, and code of conduct. Thanks!

Sample Talks

Cutting through the Archives of Erasure

How does one tell a story of the encounter with erasure? When some histories fall into the fog, and never gain a place in what is considered sanctioned historical narrative, how do we remember, engage, and interact? I consider these questions based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Miami with Latin American and Caribbean diasporic artists. In this essay I focus on Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez and Maria Martinez-Cañas, who both produce filmic works that present a reconsideration of the meaning and visualization of archives and history. In their work, Rodriguez and Martinez-Cañas cut, erase, scratch, color, and otherwise manipulate photographic and moving film to produce new images that disrupt the narratives of the archival materials, acting as palimpsests of artistic labor and archival collections. While archives are often endowed with power and preciousness, I show how these artists’ work confronts the meaning of archives and reveals the masked narratives that haunt the materiality of their work.

Mapping the Arts: Archives, Artists, and Digital Technologies

This talk focuses on the project I founded, Mapping Arts Project. I begin with a tour of the project, showing the workshop around the website via screenshots (it’s also online at mappingartsproject.org). Then I will discuss some of the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings surrounding the project and the related research. I will end with some thoughts on future plans for the project. The goal of the presentation is to start a conversation about practices and processes of historical, ethnographic, visual, and geographic research while working through both the theoretical and practical aspects of scholarship in the public sphere.

Listen to the talk as presented at Harvard University's Warren Center.

Think Like an Anthropologist.

Act Like a Designer.

Feel Like a Human.

Designing for people means understanding people, or at least trying to, and then building products that suit them. Anthropologists study people from within seeking to grasp meaning and patterns. As an anthropologist for most of my career, I spent a lot of time talking with people and learning about what makes them, them. As a designer, I put those ideas into action. Rapidly. How can we bridge the gap between years-long ethnographic research and super fast design sprints while building products for people? Anthropology and design might seem like very distant cousins, but they are effective when used together in UX and Frontend work. In this talk, I cover three main areas: thinking like an anthropologist, acting like a designer, and feeling like a human. These three areas together shape a design practice that is engaged with the people we are designing for while remaining grounded in purposeful actions.

2014

Photography as Transnational Social Practice: Black Photographers and the Representation the Past and Present - Legacies of Race and Space, American Anthropological Association Meetings, Washington, DC, December 3 – 7, 2014.

2012

Artists Engage the Landscape: Migrations and Becoming in Diaspora- Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami, Miami, Florida, November 30, 2012.

I'm From the Field: Miami as Home and Fieldsite - The Ethnographer's Craft: Works inspired by Ruth Behar, American Anthropological Association Meetings, San Francisco, California, November 14 – 18, 2012.

Mapping Miami, a public art and archive project - Miami’s Cultural Terrains, XXX International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, San Francisco, California, May 23 – 26, 2012.

2011

Performativity in the Visual Art of the Caribbean Diaspora: Traces, Actions, and Social Practice in the Work of Noelle Theárd, Antonia Wright, and Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez- Tracing Performance Aesthetics in Africa, the Caribbean, and their Diasporas: History Making, Public Art, Social Practice, and Subjectivity, American Anthropological Association Meetings, Montreal, Quebec, November 16 – 20, 2011.

2010

Photography and Memory: Reconstructing the Family Album in the Works of Cuban-born Artists Nereida García-Ferraz and Elizabeth Cerejido- Stories of Migration and Migration Stories, American Anthropological Association Meetings, New Orleans, Louisiana, November 16 – 21, 2010.

Photography and Memory: Reconstructing the Family Album – Elizabeth Cerejido and Nereida García-Ferraz - Global Caribbean(s): Interrogating the Politics of Location in Caribbean Literature and Culture, University of Miami and the Little Haiti Cultural Center, Miami, Florida, March 3 – 6, 2010.

2008

Social Relationships and the Production of Art: Toward an Anthropology of Caribbean Women Artists in Miami, Florida - American Anthropological Association Meeting: Inclusion, Collaboration and Engagement, San Francisco, California, November 19 – 23, 2008.

Performance in the Archive: Re-imagining the Cuban Diaspora and Contemporary Cuban Art through the Performance-based Photography of María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Marta Maria Peréz Bravo- Virtual Caribbeans: A Conference on Representation, Diaspora and Performance in and on the Caribbean, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, February 27 – March 1, 2008.